Guest Blogger - Kim Alden Mallin, M.D.

My vacations are usually spent on small Caribbean islands, where the diving is great but the availability of good books isn’t. So I begin hoarding books several months before a trip, usually mailing ahead a box of books to avoid weighing down my luggage with 20 pounds of books.

On a recent dive trip, I finally broke down and read the latest Michael Palmer thriller, The Fifth Vial. I have been saving it for months, keeping it in case I ran out of anything good to read. The “fifth vial" was an extra tube of blood taken with every blood draw, surreptitiously sent for tissue-typing with the results stored in a massive database and used to illegally aid in international organ trading. And it was too bad if your liver matched the CEO of some big company...tell me that won’t make you think twice about getting your blood drawn next time you go to your doctor’s office!

Although perhaps not as well known as some other physician-authors, I find Michael Palmer every bit as good as Michael Crichton, Tess Gerritsen, or Robin Cook. Robin was two years ahead of Michael at Wesleyan and they both did their medical training at Mass General. It was after reading Robin Cook’s classic thriller, Coma, that he thought, “If Robin can write a book and has the same education as I do, why can’t I write a book?”

So he sat down with his typewriter and every night wrote one page. At the end of a year, he had 365 pages and a book titled The Corey Prescription. He sent it to a friend working at a New York publishing company who promptly told Michael that his writing was terrible…but that he had a great idea for a story. And that while writing could be taught, the creative part couldn’t and he believed Michael could be taught to write.

He has since written twelve books, including several New York Times bestsellers. My favorite is Natural Causes, the story of Dr. Sarah Baldwin, a holistic healing OB/GYN who discovers that her patients are mysteriously dying from an herbal vitamin she had prescribed. At the time this book was published, I had completed most of a surgery residency and greatly identified with being female in a mostly male world, where alternative views, attitudes, and beliefs were not readily accepted. I related so strongly to his protagonist that I wrote Michael a letter (yes, on paper…this was before the internet) expressing my appreciation for his portrait of women in medicine. Amazingly, he wrote me back and we have remained in contact. He credited his sister, also a physician, with helping him make Dr. Baldwin’s experience so authentic.

Another reason I admire Michael is because of his work with the Massachusetts Medical Society Physician Health Services. He serves as an associate director of this organization, which provides assistance to physicians battling problems such as chemical dependency and alcoholism. The Fifth Vial will be out in paperback later this month and his next hardcover, The First Patient, described by Entertainment Weekly as “a terrifying vision of the Hippocratic oath gone very wrong” comes out in February 2008-just in time for my next dive trip.